UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID
FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA
TESIS DOCTORAL
El mito del self-made man en la cultura estadounidense
The myth of the self-made man in US culture
MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR
PRESENTADA POR
Alejandro de la Cruz Tapiador
DIRECTORA
Carmen M. Méndez García
UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID
FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA
DOCTORADO EN ESTUDIOS LITERARIOS
EL MITO DEL SELF-MADE MAN EN LA CULTURA
ESTADOUNIDENSE
THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN IN US CULTURE
MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR
CON MENCION INTERNACIONAL
PRESENTADA POR
Alejandro de la Cruz Tapiador
DIRECTORA
Carmen M. Méndez García
DECLARACIÓN DE AUTORÍA Y ORIGINALIDAD DE LA TESIS PRESENTADA PARA OBTENER EL TÍTULO DE DOCTOR
D./Dña. Alejandro de la Cruz Tapiador, estudiante en el Programa de Doctorado en Estudios
Literarios, de la Facultad de Filología de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, como autor/a
de la tesis presentada para la obtención del título de Doctor y titulada: EL MITO DEL
SELF-MADE MAN EN LA CULTURA ESTADOUNIDENSE y dirigida por Carmen M. Méndez García,
DECLARO QUE:
La tesis es una obra original que no infringe los derechos de propiedad intelectual ni los derechos de propiedad industrial u otros, de acuerdo con el ordenamiento jurídico vigente, en particular, la Ley de Propiedad Intelectual (R.D. legislativo 1/1996, de 12 de abril, por el que se aprueba el texto refundido de la Ley de Propiedad Intelectual, modificado por la Ley 2/2019, de 1 de marzo, regularizando, aclarando y armonizando las disposiciones legales vigentes sobre la materia), en particular, las disposiciones referidas al derecho de cita.
Del mismo modo, asumo frente a la Universidad cualquier responsabilidad que pudiera derivarse de la autoría o falta de originalidad del contenido de la tesis presentada de conformidad con el ordenamiento jurídico vigente.
En Madrid, a 10 de julio de 2019
UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID
FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA
DOCTORADO EN ESTUDIOS LITERARIOS
EL MITO DEL SELF-MADE MAN EN LA CULTURA
ESTADOUNIDENSE
THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN IN US CULTURE
MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR
CON MENCION INTERNACIONAL
PRESENTADA POR
Alejandro de la Cruz Tapiador
DIRECTORA
Carmen M. Méndez García
Nota sobre el formato
Esta tesis sigue las normas estilísticas para documentos de investigación en artes liberales y humanidades publicados por la Modern Language Association of America (MLA) en la octava edición de su MLA Handbook (2016). En dicha edición, los estándares de fuentes de documentación son prioritarios a sus formatos individuales. Debido a ello, hay cambios menores que se aplican fundamentalmente a la manera en que las fuentes bibliográficas son citadas: la puntuación es más simple e intuitiva, los volúmenes y números de publicación son identificados con claridad y la ciudad de publicación o el medio ya no son relevantes para la cita.
Agradecimientos
A la doctora Carmen M. Méndez García, por aceptar la dirección de esta tesis en primer lugar, por una profesionalidad que rivaliza con su cercanía, por su apoyo, visión y paciencia todo este tiempo. Ha sido una fuente de inspiración desde mucho antes del comienzo de este proyecto, y haber contado con su orientación es para mí un privilegio y una fuente de orgullo.
A mi familia por darme no sólo una educación, también valores y convicción. La idea central de esta tesis nació de su ejemplo, de su trabajo duro y honradez. A mi hermano, Antonio Miguel, a mi padre, Isidoro, a mi tía, Esperanza y, especialmente, a Mercedes, mi madre, que aunque ya no esté con nosotros nunca se irá del todo.
A Sandra, por una amistad de la que algún día espero ser digno. Por su apoyo incondicional y por no cejar jamás en su empeño de hacerme ver el lado bueno de las cosas. Por ser mi lugar seguro. A Ester, a Marta, a Jonathan, a Emily, porque no recuerdo la vida sin que estén ahí, pero seguro que era infinitamente menos interesante. A Vicky porque, por suerte para mí, sigue eligiendo ser parte de mi vida. A Manuela y a Pinar, por creer en mí cuando lo más sensato era no hacerlo. A mis compañeros de trabajo, por todo lo que han enseñado y aún me enseñan. A mis alumnos y alumnas, de quienes también aprendo y me enorgullezco.
Por último, quiero agradecer a la Universidad Complutense de Madrid todos los medios que pone a disposición de los y las estudiantes, sin los cuales esta investigación difícilmente hubiera sido posible. También agradezco al excelente cuerpo docente de esta universidad su labor como tal, una labor que a mi entender es inestimable.
Índice
Resumen 1
Abstract 9
Introduction 17
Introducción 13
1. Self-Made Nation: El nacimiento de la mitología estadounidense 43
2. Benjamin Franklin, el mito hecho a sí mismo: Vida, obra y pensamiento del padre
fundador en la América pre-revolucionaria 53
3. Frederick Douglass, humano hecho a sí mismo: La reivindicación de la humanidad
frente al discurso frankliniano 77
4. Abraham Lincoln, el hombre construido a sí mismo: El Self-Made Man como
imagen 99
5. R. W. Emerson y el hombre hecho de sí mismo: Reconsideración y reelaboración del
mito 127
6. Mark Twain y la parodia del mito: La era dorada del Self-Made Man 149
7. Gatsby, Capone y Franklin: Reinterpretación del mito 171
8. Herbert C. Hoover: La Gran Depresión del mito 199
9. Trescientos años de Self-Made Men: Reescribiendo a Franklin desde el
postmodernismo 225
10. Self-Made Men del capitalismo tardío: Benjamin Franklin como artículo de
consumo 251
11. Conclusiones 275
12. Conclusions 289
Resumen
Desde antes de que los Estados Unidos pudieran considerarse una nación independiente y de pleno derecho, ha habido una constante sociocultural que ha trascendido mucho más allá de las barreras del tiempo y que, como la nación en sí misma, ha evolucionado, se ha adaptado a cada época. Hoy día, permanece en el imaginario colectivo con la misma vigencia—más, si tal cosa es posible—que en el tiempo que presenció su nacimiento: el mito del Self-Made Man. El propósito de esta tesis es el de averiguar, a través de una investigación en profundidad del concepto desde su creación hasta la contemporaneidad, cuánto de mítico y cuánto de real hay en las historias de aquellos que se han erigido como sus portavoces; aclarar, en tanto que sea histórica y documentalmente verificable, si el ideal del Self-Made Man es una aspiración honesta para cualquiera que esté dispuesto a trabajar por ella o si, por el contrario, es un engaño donde el resultado de todo intento de seguir los pasos de Franklin está predeterminado por circunstancias ajenas al control del individuo. En muchos casos, como se demostrará, la respuesta no está claramente polarizada, sino que depende de un número nada desdeñable de contingencias contextuales, ajenas todas ellas al control o la voluntad del sujeto. Aunque las máximas del mito son útiles y positivas—trabajo duro, honestidad e incluso la búsqueda del bien de la comunidad— pueden ser, muy frecuentemente, interpretadas de maneras un tanto laxas o incluso utilizadas como instrumento de control de masas.
Para conseguir una visión completa sobre el mito del Self-Made Man, sobre su impacto en la sociedad, es de importancia suma entender las circunstancias políticas e históricas que rodearon a los autores, obras o figuras relevantes sometidas a análisis. En consecuencia, se le prestará la debida atención a la producción literaria no como fenómeno aislado, sino como el resultado de una relación obra-contexto, tomando en consideración las etapas históricas y culturales de los Estados Unidos en cada texto, obra o personaje histórico comentado en esta tesis. La investigación, por lo tanto, no sólo será estrictamente literaria, sino que se encuadrará en la disciplina más amplia de los Estudios Americanos. Cuatro estudios exhaustivos de la historia americana, su política, sociedad y economía han sido verdaderamente útiles a este efecto: The
American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1962), de Richard Hofstadter; A People’s History of the United States (1980), de Howard Zinn; The Pricing of Progress (2013), por Eli
Cook; y Depression to Cold War (2002), por Joseph M. Siracusa and David G. Coleman. Del mismo modo, se ha observado con detenimiento lo ya dicho sobre el Self-Made Man por autores como Irvin G. Wyllie en The Self-Made Man in America (1954); John G. Cawelti en Apostles of
the Self-Made Man (1965) o, más recientemente, Mark Lipton en Mean Men (2017). Es
del Self-Made Man: su naturaleza excluyente. El propio nombre del mito, sus orígenes y sus máximos representantes han tendido a obviar a la mujer en algo que se presenta como un sesgo cultural claro. De la misma manera, esta mencionada naturaleza excluyente también ha obrado en perjuicio de los grupos étnicos que, aunque cuentan con cierta presencia en esta tesis, es una presencia que evidencia que las circunstancias materiales y sociales de la historia estadounidense en relación con el mito del Self-Made Man han tendido a obstaculizar su progreso.
Cada capítulo se centrará en figuras culturalmente relevantes para el imaginario norteamericano en relación al mito frankliniano a través del tiempo, desde el pasado hasta el presente, desde lo literario hasta lo político e histórico: Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Raph W. Emerson, Al Capone, etcétera. Se analizará hasta qué punto estas y otra figuras han influido, perpetuado, o malinterpretado el antiguo ideal de “from rags to riches” con los medios—o barreras—que hayan encontrado en su camino, en sus contextos, en su tiempo, en sus Estados Unidos. Debido a la diversidad de figuras y el lapso de tiempo a analizar, la presencia de las mencionadas fuentes principales será variable en función del capítulo, y cada capítulo, a su vez, generará sus propias lecturas principales de las cuales derivarán las secundarias.
Una de las conclusiones que se pueden sacar de este trabajo es que analizar el mito del
Self-Made Man desde su etapa embrionaria hasta su adultez es analizar la historia y la cultura de
la nación que lo alberga y viceversa, considerando que estas instancias coexisten de manera tan íntimamente entrelazada que dibujar las fronteras entre ellas—si tal cosa fuera remotamente posible incluso a nivel simbólico—sería una difícil tarea.
Antes de Benjamin Franklin, aquellas ideas del trabajo duro, la honestidad y la prosperidad como la justa recompensa a semejantes virtudes ya flotaban en el imaginario colectivo de una manera difusa, informe. Fue el propio Franklin quien las recolectó, les dio forma y las transformó en su obra maestra: el mito del Self-Made Man, encarnado en su propia persona. No obstante, cada pensamiento de Franklin, cada consideración, aunque en su momento eran—y aún son—tenidas por universales, estaban dirigidas a una audiencia muy concreta: la llamada “clase media”, entendiendo como tal a ese conjunto altamente heterogéneo que sirve como puente entre los estratos sociales más económicamente pudientes y aquellos más empobrecidos. La diferencia más fundamental entre esa clase media y la clase trabajadora, si es que se hubiera de considerar distintas, no es verdaderamente significativa en la medida en que ambas dependen de su trabajo para vivir; pero allí donde la clase trabajadora aspira a la mera supervivencia, la clase media se sitúa en una posición ligeramente superior en términos económicos y sus aspiraciones están más orientadas a la mejora de estatus. El propio Benjamin Franklin nació en el seno de esta
clase y a ello se debe que su discurso, ya desde el principio, esté fundamentalmente pensado para la clase media, aunque se le considere universal.
Otra de las piedras angulares del pensamiento frankliniano es el individualismo. No en un sentido pernicioso o siquiera negativo, el individualismo en Franklin se limitaba a animar a las personas a mejorar, a alcanzar la mejor versión de sí mismas, a compartir esos valores con la comunidad, a ser ejemplo. Las ideas fundacionales del Self-Made Man, como se verá, no estaban únicamente enfocadas a lo pecuniario, sino al beneficio común. La meta de esta tesis no es, ni pretende ser, menoscabar los ideales del mito, sino constatar una instrumentalización indebida de éste o una, por así decirlo, mala praxis de dimensiones históricas.
Así, a medida que transcurren los años, las ideas se alteran, los tiempos definen a la gente—y viceversa—y, a medida que la distancia aumenta, el punto de partida se empieza a ver cada vez más borroso. El concepto del Self-Made Man, aunque perdurable, no estaba hecho para conservar sus líneas fundamentales más allá de la vida de su creador.
Una demostración clara de que la magnitud de la prosperidad guarda una proporcionalidad directa con el punto de partida se encuentra en la historia de Frederick Douglass. Douglass, nacido en el criminal seno del esclavismo, al igual que tantos otros antes y después de él, tuvo que hacerse a sí mismo en el más estricto de los sentidos, reclamando, para empezar, su misma condición humana. El consentimiento—y el respaldo—al sistema esclavista por parte del gobierno estadounidense de la época no sólo consideraba a seres humanos como poco más que herramientas, sino que traicionaba toda noción de libertad e igualdad, nociones en las que la nación encontró su razón de ser y los motivos para la Revolución. El esclavismo suponía anteponer al relato de la meritocracia todo un sistema económico y político, con todo el rigor y la crueldad de sus cuerpos represivos con el solo propósito de evitar que un más que considerable porcentaje de la población no alcanzase ya no la prosperidad, sino el simple y llano reconocimiento de su humanidad.
En este contexto de los Estados Unidos esclavistas, una personalidad destaca entre todas las demás, cuya historia se sitúa como prácticamente el opuesto diametral a la de Frederick Douglass: Abraham Lincoln, uno de los más reverenciados políticos en la cultura americana. Como se analizará, la razón por la que la vida de Lincoln se puede situar en el polo opuesto de la de Douglass no es su posición hacia el sistema esclavista, sino las circunstancias en las que se desarrollaron ambas personalidades, sus posiciones dentro del sistema esclavista. Lincoln puede considerarse un digno defensor de los ideales de Franklin en tanto que ambos fueron hombres blancos de clase media en un tiempo en el que las oportunidades que se les brindaban eran infinitamente más prometedoras que aquellas que tenía cualquier hombre nacido en la esclavitud. Además, la vida de Lincoln y su trágico final contribuyó enormemente a la creación de una
leyenda en torno a una figura política que ya era memorable per se, una leyenda que también encajaba en los términos del Self-Made Man.
El legado de Lincoln es indiscutible, algo que quizá no se puede decir del legado del
Self-Made Man frankliniano. Durante la etapa de la reconstrucción (1863–1877) el mito empezó
a ser seriamente cuestionado por autores como Francis Parkman o James Fenimore Cooper, quienes consideraban el mito del Self-Made Man como una barrera para el verdadero progreso cultural de una sociedad demasiado preocupada por satisfacer las más inmediatas y mundanas necesidades como para prestarle la debida atención a las causas más elevadas, una sociedad cuya deificación acrítica del hombre hecho a sí mismo acabaría abocándola a una mera plutocracia sin más aspiración cultural que la veneración del dinero. Así, lo más recomendable según Parkman y Cooper era promover una especie de clerecía intelectual dedicada únicamente a la generación, diseminación y preservación del conocimiento, a expandir los estándares culturales de la joven nación. En el “lado” opuesto—si un término así fuese apropiado, ya que no era un debate abierto en sentido estricto, sino perspectivas que, como se ha demostrado, bien podían considerarse complementarias—estaban autores como Ralph Waldo Emerson o Walt Whitman. De acuerdo con su pensamiento, la manera de conseguir las metas propuestas por Parkman y Cooper no era promover una clase intelectual, sino “intelectualizar” a la sociedad como conjunto, universalizar el conocimiento, la cultura. Estas visiones de Emerson y Whitman se pueden considerar más en sintonía con el legado de Franklin, ya que llamaban al desarrollo del potencial de cada individuo en todos los aspectos, incluyendo el moral y el cultural. Esta base lógica dio lugar al nacimiento del movimiento de la autocultura, y, en el caso de Emerson, a una profunda revisión de la ideología del Self-Made Man. A través de su vasta obra, Emerson demostró un intenso conocimiento de lo que debía ser el Self-Made Man: un conocimiento, quizás, mayor que el del propio Benjamin Franklin. Desafortunadamente, y por motivos que en absoluto pueden ser achacados a Emerson, su rica corriente de pensamiento, centrada en que el individuo viera y comprendiera el mundo empezando por sí mismo como el primer paso en el camino hacia la prosperidad, dio pie a toda una nueva “filosofía” basada en la reducción al absurdo y la malinterpretación sistemática de universo conceptual emersoniano, conocida en primera instancia como “New Thought”, madre del género de la autoayuda, que en la contemporaneidad goza de cada vez mejor salud.
Una cosa en particular era cierta en las ideas de Emerson, Parkman, Whitman o Cooper, entre otros: la persecución desmesurada de la riqueza por cualquier medio era negativa para el progreso no sólo cultural, sino el social de la nación estadounidense. The Gilded Age: A Tale of
Today (1873), por Mark Twain y Charles Dudley Warner, ilustra este concepto de la búsqueda
maniaca de ganancia económica. Descriptivo del período histórico que debe su nombre a su título, este libro también es ciertamente confesional por parte de Twain y de ciertos aspectos de su vida.
Situado en un período de moderado crecimiento económico en el marco de la Reconstrucción, y con esos tonos satíricos tan característicos de Twain, por un lado, la novela narra de una manera muy aguda el desarrollo industrial y territorial encabezado por el ferrocarril; por el otro, también sirve como ejemplo de lo que supuso en su momento la malinterpretación de la escuela emersoniana de pensamiento en relación al mito del Self-Made Man, encarnado en el personaje de Beriah Sellars, un charlatán al estilo del Wilkins Micawber dickensiano. Esa Gilded Age, nombre verdaderamente adecuado en tanto que se le aplica a aquello que sólo tiene una leve pátina dorada, fue no sólo un periodo de cuestionable bonanza económica, sino que también conformaría los cimientos de un sistema económico estadounidense extraordinariamente débil, volátil e impredecible que colapsaría de manera casi total en 1929.
Estos frágiles cimientos económicos, junto con la mentalidad del hacerse rico de la noche a la mañana y el individualismo exacerbado le dieron forma a la entrada de los Estados Unidos en el siglo XX.En los tiempos de los robber barons, la Ley Seca y la era del jazz, dos
figuras, una literaria, la otra histórica, invitan a la reflexión sobre el estado de la ideología frankliniana en el momento: Jay Gatsby y Al Capone. Ambos personajes comparten numerosos factores considerando las bases dispuestas por Franklin y su ulterior elaboración por parte de la escuela emersoniana: voluntad, iniciativa, compromiso, disciplina y visión. Ambos, de manera paralela, recorren el camino que discurre “from rags to riches” de una manera que podría considerarse el resultado de una interpretación simplista—y aun así comprensible—del individualismo en su vertiente negativa con la riqueza como única meta válida. Esta interpretación deriva de una lectura del mito que reduce las máximas franklinianas a mera autoayuda, desvistiéndolas de todo lo que no pudiera ser económicamente productivo, beneficioso o propagandístico de lo que más tarde se conocería como “The American Way”; deshaciéndose de todo sentido del bien común, colaboración o asociacionismo. Gatsby y Capone, indudablemente, tenían un profundo entendimiento del funcionamiento de su entorno sociopolítico y lo usaron en su beneficio. Sus historias son altamente elocuentes de la narración de cómo los mejores y los más adaptados son los que prevalecen; pero esa narración tendría más sentido en el escenario de una igualdad real de oportunidades con unas normas bien establecidas. Así, sus historias, y aquellas que vengan después, demostrarán que la movilidad social es teóricamente plausible, pero prácticamente ilegal en tanto que los medios para lograrla, muy a menudo, implican quebrantar las leyes.
Naturalmente, esta idea nunca ha sido reconocida o mínimamente sugerida por los grandes creyentes en el mito del Self-Made Man, como Herbert C. Hoover, que albergaba una ferviente devoción por la excepcionalidad del individualismo americano, el único que, a sus ojos, garantizaba la igualdad de oportunidades y la victoria de la meritocracia en un entorno de libertad y prosperidad con una observación suficiente de unas leyes que evitaban el abuso sin ser coactivas
o excesivamente estrictas. El colapso del sistema económico norteamericano en octubre de 1929 no tardaría en contradecirle, aunque Hoover, un Self-Made Man de pleno derecho, permanecía inasequible al desaliento ante una realidad que le acosaba durante la Gran Depresión. Los “Dirty Thirties”, sus rigores hacia el pueblo de los Estados Unidos, casi le asestaron al mito del
Self-Made Man su golpe mortal, dejando al ideal frankliniano herido de gravedad hasta su
tricentenario, relegándolo al perfil bajo hasta su gran renacimiento durante la segunda era dorada de Wall Street en los años ochenta. Los denominados Long Sixties—esto es, el lapso de tiempo que se extiende desde finales de los años cincuenta hasta mediados de los años setenta—fueron un período de progreso, de una conquista de derechos civiles largamente pospuesta, un período en el que las figuras y patrones sociales tradicionales casi quedaron arrinconados en el ostracismo. El mito del Self-Made Man no fue una excepción, considerando que es, fundamentalmente, un ideal de clase media, blanco y masculino. Pero en los ochenta, el giro conservador de la política estadounidense durante la administración Reagan (1981–1989) le dio un nuevo impulso a una nueva versión del Self-Made Man, preparándola para el siglo XXI.
Acabados los Long Sixties, esa nueva versión del Self-Made Man basada en consideraciones a posteriori se puede considerar una mercancía lista para ser adquirida por esa nueva clase de hombres franklinianos: los ejecutivos de Wall Street y los titanes empresariales. Dos entidades, una literaria, real la otra, han sido analizadas para ilustrar este concepto: Eric Packer, protagonista de la novela de Don DeLillo Cosmopolis (2003) y Jordan Belfort, más conocido por su sobrenombre “The Wolf of Wall Street”, el título de su narrativa autobiográfica de 2007. Ambas personalidades tienen una buena relación con los términos contemporáneos del
Self-Made Man en tanto que ambos lograron amasar una considerable fortuna con su trabajo y,
por lo tanto y a los ojos de la sociedad, se puede considerar que son personas trabajadoras y que su riqueza es bien merecida. Ambos ilustran la dimensión resultadista en la que entró el mito del
Self-Made Man con el nuevo milenio: los medios no importan, sólo la consecución del objetivo.
Además son un extraordinario ejemplo de ese individualismo tan presente en los tiempos modernos: son exitosos, pero han alcanzado—deben alcanzar, de hecho—la cima solos.
No es sorprendente, por tanto, que el mito del Self-Made Man, más de tres siglos después de su nacimiento, no sólo sea promocionado, sino que goce de tan buena salud. La situación socioeconómica actual necesita desesperadamente modelos de comportamiento que justifiquen unas exigencias disfrazadas de valores. Como se ha demostrado, el mito del Self-Made Man, aparte de su naturaleza mítica, es verdaderamente necesario para resolver las innumerables contradicciones sistémicas presentes en la esfera socioeconómica actual con su brillante simplicidad. Semejante esfera, semejante estado de las cosas, necesita disimular su absoluta incapacidad de proporcionar una vida digna a aquellos que lo mantienen en funcionamiento fomentando la iniciativa individual y el llamado ímpetu empresarial. Las historias sobre empezar
desde cero, sobre compañías multinacionales fundadas en garajes, y cualquier narrativa que confirme la famosa máxima “from rags to riches” son de gran utilidad para demostrar que tales hazañas son aún posibles aunque, como este estudio ha demostrado, el concepto del Self-Made
Abstract
Since the very dawn of the United States as a nation, an event which could be dated even before it was a full-fledged, independent country, there has been a sociocultural constant, one especially, that has gone far beyond the barriers of time and, like the nation itself, has evolved, being fashioned by every single era. Today, it remains in the collective imaginary with equal validity—or greater, if possible—than in the time that witnessed its birth: the myth of the Self-Made Man. The aim of this work is to find out, through an in-depth research of the concept from its creation to contemporaneity, how much of the mythical there is in the stories of those who have risen as its most faithful spokesmen; to elucidate, as far as possible and through the textually and historically verifiable, if the Self-Made Man ideal is an honest aspiration reachable by anyone with the will to work for it or if, on the contrary, it is a game played with marked cards where the starting point is determined by circumstances beyond individual control. In many cases, as will be proved, the answer is not clearly polarized but depending on a substantial number of contextual contingencies, alien to the control or the will of the individual. Albeit the maxims of the myth are positively virtuous—hard work, honesty, and even the search of collective welfare—they can, very frequently, be interpreted in quite lax ways or even be used as an instrument for mass control. In order to achieve as complete a vision as possible about the myth of the Self-Made Man, its impact on society, it is exceedingly important understanding the historical and political circumstances around authors, works, and relevant figures to be analyzed. Consequently, due attention will be paid to literary production not as an isolated phenomenon, but as an outcome of a close work-context relation, taking into consideration the world, the eras, the stages of History and American culture of every single literary work and/or historical character analyzed in this project. The research, hence, will not only be strictly literary, it will also be culture-oriented, fitting into the discipline of American Studies. Four exhaustive studies of the American history, its politics, society and economy, have been highly useful for this task: Richard Hofstadter’s The
American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1962); Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980); Eli Cook’s The Pricing of Progress (2013) and Depression to Cold War (2002), by Joseph M. Siracusa and David G. Coleman. Likewise, due attention has
been paid to those things already said and written about the Self-Made Man by authors like Irvin G. Wyllie in The Self-Made Man in America (1954); John G. Cawelti in Apostles of the Self-Made
Man (1965) or, more recently, Mark Lipton in Mean Men (2017). It is precisely in the latter that
a tendency—not an accident at all—in the myth of the Self-Made Man is thoroughly studied: its excluding nature. The conceptual map—starting with the very name of the myth—of the Self-Made Man is inclined to obviate nuances of gender, or include women, but this is more than a mere tendency: it is an evident cultural bias. Apart from the obvious gender issue is the ethnic
question, which, although having certain presence in this work, is illustrative of the material and social circumstances of American history regarding the myth of the Self-Made Man concerning ethnic groups.
Every chapter will focus on a culturally relevant figure in the North-American imaginary concerned with the myth of the Self-Made Man over time, from past to present, from the literary to the politic and historic: Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Al Capone, etcetera. The analysis will clarify to what extent these figures have followed, influenced, improved, perpetuated or misinterpreted the ideal of starting from naught and achieving prosperity with the means—or barriers—they found along the way, in their contexts, in their times, in their America. Due to the diversity of figures and the time span included in the analysis, the presence of the aforementioned main sources will vary depending on the chapter, and each chapter will, logically, have its own main readings from which the secondary ones will be subsequent.
One of the conclusions to be made from this work is that analyzing the myth of the Self-Made Man from its embryonic stage to its adulthood is to analyze the history and culture of the nation that harbors it, and vice versa, since these entities coexist so intimately intertwined that drawing dividing lines amongst them—if such a thing was remotely possible, even in a symbolic level—entails an arduous task.
Before Benjamin Franklin, those ideas of hard work, honesty and prosperity as its righteous reward were already suspended in the collective imaginary, diffuse, shapeless. It was him who collected, cohered and made from it his opus magnum: the myth of the Self-Made Man, incarnated in his very own public persona. Every single consideration of Franklin’s, deliberately or not, and even though since the beginning these considerations were held as universal, they had—have—a very precise target audience: the so-called “middle class”, understanding as such a social aggregate highly heterogeneous which works as a bridge between the most affluent social strata and those most impoverished. In Franklin’s time, small landowners, small merchants and skilled craftsmen/workers belonged to this group. The difference of the so-called middle class with the working one, it they happen to be mentioned as different instances, is not truly substantial insofar both classes depend on their work to live; but while the working class has mere survival as its ultimate goal, the aspirations of the middle class tend to aim in the direction of transcending, of improving their status. Franklin himself emerged from this class. That is the main reason why the discourse of the Self-Made Man, even from the beginning, is profoundly middle-class, although thought of as universal.
Another cornerstone of the Franklinian discourse is individualism. Not an intrinsically pernicious nor negative idea as thought by Franklin: individuals willing to improve, to reach the
best version of themselves, to amend the community, to be an example. The Self-Made Man foundational ideas were not aimed solely to the worldliness of the pecuniary, but to the common benefit.
But as years go by, ideas are altered, time defines people (and vice versa) and, as the distance increases, the starting point becomes blurred by the day. The concept of the Self-Made Man, although lasting, was not bound to preserve its essence beyond the life of its main architect.
A self-evident demonstration of prosperity, its magnitude, is correlated with the starting point can be found in the chapter dedicated to Frederick Douglass who, like all of his fellowmen born in criminal slave system, had to become Self-Made Men in the strictest of senses: they had to start by claiming their very humanity. The government’s consent to slavery in the time not only reduced human beings to beasts, but betrayed every ground of freedom, equality and the narrative of meritocracy on which the United States were said to have their raison d’être, by posing an entire economic and political system, with its cruelly rigorous repressive bodies, with the sole purpose of preventing an important section of society from not only achieving the maxims of the Self-Made Man, but from getting the mere recognition of their human condition.
In the context of these United (Slave-Holding) States of America, one personality stands out high above every other and is practically the exact opposite to Frederick Douglass’ story: Abraham Lincoln, one of the most revered politicians in American—an almost worldwide— culture. As will be analyzed, the reason why Lincoln’s and Douglass’ lives can be placed as poles apart is not their position towards slavery, but the circumstances in which one had developed compared to the other, their positions within slavery. Lincoln may well be a worthy defender of the Franklinian ideals inasmuch as both were white, middle-class men in the context of a time when their opportunities were infinitely more promising than those of a man born in slavery. In addition, Lincoln’s life, its tragic outcome, contributed enormously to the creation of a legend around an already memorable political and historical figure; a legend, too, within the terms of the Self-Made Men.
Lincoln’s legacy is undisputable, but it is not so in the case of Franklin’s and the Self-Made Man. During the Reconstruction, the myth began to be seriously questioned by reputed authors such as Francis Parkman or James Fenimore Cooper, who regarded the Franklinian ideal as a barrier to true cultural progress in a society which was too busy satisfying its most immediate and mundane needs to be able to focus properly on more elevated causes, a society whose uncritical deification of the Self-Made Man would end up turning it into a mere and brute plutocracy, with no more cultural criteria than the worship of money. Thus, the position in this regard was, from Cooper and Parkman’s point of view, to promote an intellectual class devoted to the generation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge, to expand the cultural standards
of the young nation. On the opposite “side”—if such term were remotely appropriate, for it was not an open debate but perspectives which, as will be shown, could certainly be complementary in some respects—were authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. According to them, the way to achieve those goals proposed by Parkman and Cooper was not by means of an intellectual “priesthood”, but through the universalization of knowledge, of culture. That vision of Whitman’s and Emerson’s can be considered the ones most attuned to Franklin’s legacy as they appealed to the development of individual potential in its strictest sense, including the cultural and moral. Such rationale gave birth to the Self-Culture movement, and, in the case of Emerson, a profound, top-down revision of the Self-Made Man ideology. Throughout is vast work, Emerson demonstrated a deep understanding of what the Self-Made Man should be, even greater, perhaps, than Franklin’s own. Regrettably, and for reasons which he could not the one to blame, his rich current of thought, centered on the individual, his vision and his comprehension of the world as the driving force on the pathway to prosperity, sparked a whole “philosophy” based on the oversimplification and misinterpretation of the Emersonian conceptual universe, known in its first stage as “New Thought”, and the germ of the whole genre of self-help paraphernalia, which even today enjoys an increasingly better health.
One thing, particularly, was true in Emerson, Whitman, Parkman or Cooper, inter alia: the excessive pursuit of wealth by any means was malicious for the cultural, and especially social, progress of the American nation. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, illustrates the concept of that maniacal chase after money, a book written in a time that owes its name to the title, as well as some aspects of the life of Mark Twain himself, under the perspective of the Self-Made Man. Set in a period of moderate economic growth fostered by the Reconstruction, and with those satirical undertones so characteristic of Twain, the book narrates in a very acute manner the industrial and territorial development led by the railroad, and, on the other hand, a clear example of what the misinterpretation of the Emersonian school of thought entails in concerning the myth of the Self-Made Man, incarnated in the character Beriah Sellers, a Dickensian Wilkins Micawber-fashioned chatterbox. Such Golden Age, a truly appropriate name insofar as it has only a slight patina of gold, was not only a period of questionable economic bonanza, but also would conform the foundations of an extraordinarily weak, volatile and unpredictable economic system in the United States which ultimately collapsed in 1929.
These weak economic foundations, along with a rising get-rich-quick mentality and exacerbated individualism shaped the entrance of the United States in the twentieth century. In the times of the robber barons, the Prohibition, the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age, two figures, one fictional, the other real, invite reflection on the state of the Franklinian ideology at the time: Jay Gatsby and Al Capone. Both characters share several important factors considering
the bases laid by Franklin and their further elaboration by the Emersonian school of thought: volition, initiative, commitment, discipline and vision. Both, likewise, walk the road that goes from rags to riches in a way that could be considered the result of a profit-seeking, simplistic interpretation—and nonetheless understandable—of an exacerbated individualism with wealth as the only valid goal. This interpretation derives from a reading of the myth which reduces the Franklinian maxims to mere self-help, denuding them of all that could not be economically productive, profitable or propagandistic of what would later be called “The American Way”; getting rid of every sense of common good, collaboration, associationism. Gatsby and Capone, undoubtedly, had a deep understanding about how their sociopolitical environment worked and used it in their own private benefit. Their stories are highly eloquent of a so-called historical truth, an ever-lasting narration about how the best and the fittest are the ones who prevail; but such a thing would make more sense in a scenario of real equality of opportunity and well-established rules. Thus, their stories, and those stories to come, will demonstrate that social mobility is theoretically plausible but practically illegal inasmuch as the means to achieve that upward mobility, very frequently, implies breaking the law.
Naturally, this idea has never been recognized or minimally implied by the great believers in the Self-Made Man, such as Herbert C. Hoover, who harbored a fervent devotion for the exceptionality of American individualism, the only one which, in his eyes, guaranteed the equality of opportunity and triumph of meritocracy in an environment of freedom and prosperity with a sufficient observation and guardianship of the rules to avoid abuse without being coercive or excessively strict. The collapse of the American economic system in October 1929 would soon prove him wrong, although Hoover, himself a true Self-Made Man in his own right, remained unaffected by discouragement in the face of a reality that besieged him during the Great Depression. The “Dirty Thirties”, and its rigors against the people of the United States almost dealt the myth of the Self-Made Man its mortal blow, leaving the Franklinian ideal severely wounded until its tercentenary, making fall to a relatively low profile until its great rebirth during Wall Street’s second golden age in 1980s. Those so called Long Sixties—that is, the span extending from the late 50s to mid-70s—were a period of progress, of a long-postponed conquest of civil rights, a period in which traditional figures and patterns almost fell to ostracism. The myth of the Self-Made Man being, as it is, a fundamentally middle-class, male, white ideal, became outdated for a long while. But in the eighties, the conservative turn of American politics during the Reagan administration (1981–1989) gave momentum to a new and ready for the twenty-first century version of the Self-Made Man.
Long Sixties over, that new version of the Myth of the Self-Made Man, under a posteriori
considerations, can be considered a commodity prone to be purchased by the new class of Franklinian men. Such new version, if thought a posteriori, can be considered a very logical one
taking into account those features of its ideological corpus that, as this dissertation will study, have been promoted throughout history to the detriment of others that could be less productive or convenient: individualism, wealth as the ultimate goal and meritocracy only as a fait-accompli story and only as long as it serves as a justification. All this is excellently reflected in Tom Wolfe’s
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), which shows that stratified, warring and stagnant New York
society of the eighties, with its social-class subtypes and their common interest: attaining wealth by any means. Concerning the myth of the Self-Made Man, Wolfe’s novel portrays a socio-economic system where commodity fetishism reigns supreme, where the personal virtues that must necessarily accompany the Franklinian man have their space increasingly reduced, and where the hard work to achieve the independence of the individual is beginning to be replaced by the notion of productivity, where those very individuals—especially the working class—are valued as commodities which are considered useful for the amount of economic output that can be extracted from them. Personal fulfillment began to become a contingency external to the individual and not identifiable in objective and absolute terms, but through the valuation of third parties within the social contract of the acquisition of fetish-goods. However, in Wolfe’s novel these circumstances are only suggested in a fictionalized and almost parodic manner, which does not make them less certain, but more subtle and less premonitory. But Wolfe, in The Bonfire of
the Vanities, in an undoubtedly conscious way, was criticizing these values—or, perhaps the lack
of them—that were already dehumanizing society and therefore the Self-Made Man, which would continue to evolve and reach their highest ground in the times of late capitalism
This strictly economic, individual-oriented focus entailed the emergency of a whole “new race”—taking the concept from Crèvecœur—of potential Self-Made Men in the American scene: Wall-Street executives and entrepreneurial juggernauts. Two instances, one literary, the other real, have been analyzed to illustrate this concept: Eric Packer, protagonist of Don DeLillo’s
Cosmopolis (2003) and Jordan Belfort, better known by the nickname “The Wolf of Wall Street”,
the title of his 2007 autobiographical narrative. Both entities are in a good relationship with the contemporary terms of the Self-Made Man as both achieved a considerable prosperity with their work, and thus, in the eyes of society, it can be considered that they are hard workers and that their wealth is well deserved. Both of them illustrate the result-oriented dimension in which the myth of the Self-Made Man entered the new millennium: means do not matter as long as the objective is achieved. Besides, Belfort and Packer stand as a remarkable example of that individualism so present in modern times: they are successful, but they have reached—must reach, indeed—the top alone.
It is not surprising, thus, that the myth of the Self-Made Man, more than three centuries after its birth, is not only supported, but also enjoys extraordinary good health. The current socioeconomic situation desperately needs models of behavior to justify its demands, disguising
them as values. As will be demonstrated, the myth of the Self-Made Man, apart from its very mythical nature, is utterly necessary to solve the innumerable systemic contradictions present in today’s socioeconomic sphere with its brilliant simplicity. Such a sphere, such a state of things, needs to conceal its absolute inability to provide a dignified life to those who keep it functioning by appraising individual initiative and the so-called entrepreneurial impetus. Stories about starting from nothing, companies founded in garages, and any narrative that confirms the famous maxim “from rags to riches” are highly useful to show that such feats are still possible although, as this study has shown, the concept of Self-Made Man in the contemporaneity has been reduced to a commodity or an a posteriori imposture.
Introduction
Since the dawn of the United States as a nation, a birth that would not be too audacious to date even before the very United States could be called a full-fledged, independent country, there has been a sociocultural constant, a very specific one, that has transcended the barriers of time and, like the nation itself, has evolved, taking shape according to every epoch. Today, this constant remains in the collective imaginary with equal validity—even greater, if such a thing was possible—than in the time that witnessed its creation: the myth of the Self-Made Man. The purpose of this work is to find out, by tracing the concept from its birth to contemporaneity, how much of the mythical or how much of the real there is in those who have risen as its faithful spokesmen; to elucidate, as far as possible and through the textually and historically verifiable, if the Self-Made Man ideal is an honest aspiration, reachable by anyone with the will to work for it or, on the contrary, it is a game played with marked cards where the starting point is determined by circumstances beyond individual control. In many cases, as will be further proved, the answer is not clearly polarized into a yes or a no, but depending on a substantial number of contextual contingencies, beyond the control or the will of the individual. Albeit the maxims of the myth are positively virtuous—hard work, honesty, and even the search of collective welfare—they can, very frequently, be interpreted in quite lax terms or even be used as an instrument for mass control. In order to achieve as complete a vision as possible of the myth of the Self-Made Man, and its impact on society, it is exceedingly important to understand the historical and political circumstances around authors, works, and relevant figures to be analyzed. Consequently, due attention will be paid to literary production not as an isolated phenomenon, but as an outcome of a close work-context relation, taking into consideration the world, the eras, the stages of History and American culture of every single literary work and/or historical character analyzed in this project. The research, hence, will not be strictly literary: it will also be culture-oriented, fitting into the discipline of American Studies. Four exhaustive studies of American history, its politics, society and economy, have been highly useful for this task: Richard Hofstadter’s The American
Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1962); Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980); Eli Cook’s The Pricing of Progress (2013) and Depression to Cold War
(2002), by Joseph M. Siracusa and David G. Coleman. Likewise, due attention has been paid to what was already said and written about the Self-Made Man by authors like Irvin G. Wyllie in
The Self-Made Man in America (1954); John G. Cawelti in Apostles of the Self-Made Man (1965)
or, more recently, Mark Lipton in Mean Men (2017). It is precisely in the latter that a tendency— not an accident at all—in the myth of the Self-Made Man is thoroughly studied: its excluding nature. The conceptual map—starting with the very name of the myth—of the Self-Made Man is inclined to obviate nuances of gender, or include women, but this is more than a mere tendency: it is an evident cultural bias. On the grounds of diverse nature studies, statistical, sociological,
psychological and even epidemiological—on the incidence of antisocial behaviors, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, etcetera—Lipton concludes that, socially speaking, the “assessment” of certain situations or behavioral patterns is directly gender-connected. The externalization of a given feeling, anger for instance, tends to be considered as a result of the direct influence of external, objective circumstances, naturally instantiated, if the one who manifests this feeling happens to be a man. In case the very same rage is expressed by a woman, continuing with Lipton’s argumentation, the tendency is to consider such emotion as personality-triggered, without any need of an external instigation. Thereby, the same behavioral traits which are often considered “leadership skills” or “initiative” in the male gender are perceived—and labelled—in much more negative ways in the female gender. It is not complicated, especially in modern times, to find examples of economically successful and/or famous men whose difficulty—or inability— to manage certain temperamental outbursts is not only minimally questioned, but considered acceptable and even rewarded. Therefore, it does make sense to assert that the story of the Self-Made Woman possesses in itself sufficient material to conduct further research. An investigation on the Self-Made Man from the perspective of Masculinity Studies would also be extremely pertinent, considering that many of the behavioral traits which, especially nowadays, a number of archetypical Franklinian men show are traditionally attributed to the “man” as a social construct. Apart from the obvious gender issue is the ethnic question, which, although having certain presence in this work, is illustrative of the material and social circumstances of American history regarding the myth of the Self-Made Man concerning ethnic groups. A study of the Self-Made Man with an ethnic focus would also be of utmost importance since, as will be elaborated on in this work, the ethos of the myth is fundamentally oriented towards white people for a matter of mere convenience and survival of the myth itself: going after Franklin’s legacy, following his steps, fulfilling this part of the American Dream, is not something available for everyone, not even the majority. Those basic elements which were considered to indicate starting from scratch in such relevant personalities as Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln were, as it will be demonstrated in chapter three, the great goal to meet for people like Frederick Douglass. Nonetheless, that pursuit of the maxim “from rags to riches” and/or the everlasting American Dream has been, and still is, a key factor in most migratory movements with the United States as destination.
A study of the Self-Made Man using Myth-Criticism would also be interesting, since the present research does not focus on the archetypal level of the myth or the symbolic organization of the imaginary as proposed by Gilbert Durand in Les structures anthropologiques de
l’immaginaire (1960). Likewise, this research could not be framed within the discipline of
Cultural Myth Criticism as proposed by José Manuel Losada in Mito y Mundo Contemporáneo (2010) since, although certainly multidisciplinary in nature, this research is not standard myth
criticism inasmuch as it does not analyze the myth separately from any notion of ideology, but as an instrument historically ascribed to it. The most plausible Myth-Criticism approach for this research would be as proposed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in Dialektik der
Aufklärung (1944), for whom the myth in modernity is a negative concept, only suitable for
propaganda, political demagogy and manipulation, and thus something illusory, false or fictitious. The myth of the Self-Made Man has surely had an evolution from its start to contemporaneity which has put it very close to those concepts proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer, but neither its birth nor its fundamental ideals were intrinsically negative; on the contrary, they represented an ideal whose fruition would bring positive repercussions for the community as a whole.
Each of the main works used in this research provide valuable information in more ways than one. For instance, Richard Hofstadter offers pertinent historical and political analyses of the most notable American presidents with exhaustive documentation and a sufficient critical distance so as not to fall neither into acritical celebration nor into systematic, pointless criticism. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is already a classic approach to American history oriented to its social aspects and those facts which, too often, tend to fall into oblivion. Undoubtedly, there is a certain ideological bias in Zinn that permeates his work to some extent, but since the text has been chosen as a work of reference for verifiable historical facts, this precise authorial bias does not acquire great relevance beyond the purely narratological. The aforementioned research by Eli Cook provides a historical study oriented to the North American economic and cultural spheres, with utterly interesting points of view regarding the transition from a slave economy to a wage-labor-based economy, an ineluctably relevant question, bearing in mind the strong connections between the myth of the Self-Made Man and work as a means to achieve prosperity.
Each chapter will focus on a culturally relevant figure of the American imaginary in relation to the myth of the Self-Made Man over time, from its birth to the present, from the literary to the political and historical: Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph W. Emerson, Al Capone… The analysis will clarify to what extent these figures have followed, influenced, improved, perpetuated or misinterpreted the ideal of starting from naught and achieving prosperity with the means—or barriers—that they were provided by the contexts of each era. Due to the diversity of figures and the time span embraced by the analysis, the use of the main sources above will vary depending on the chapter, and each chapter will, logically, have its own main readings from which the secondary ones will derive.
The history of the United States began to be written in November, 1620, when those religious separatists known as the Pilgrims, disembarked from the Mayflower in the place that would later become the city of Plymouth and its homonym colony. The intentions of these first
colonists were far from breaking relations with England or forming a nation. In fact, theirs was a voyage in search of religious freedom, in search of a place to profess their religiosity away from pressure or prosecution of official Anglicanism and, at the same time, remain English, both the Pilgrims themselves and their descendants. The British colonies in America represented the ideal place for this purpose. The feat of the Pilgrims, their morality, their idealism and their utopian vision based on the theological belief of being the chosen people were, unintentionally, part of the very seed of American exceptionalism, the set of sociopolitical beliefs that would mark the development of the country ever since and forever: freedom, egalitarianism, a sense of community and individualism, the notion that the American nation has a unique history or, more modestly, some highly distinctive historical and cultural characteristics in comparison with the rest of Western countries. This mixture of boldness, determination and religious self-denial will produce what authors like John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur or Alexis de Tocqueville will consider a new—in Crèvecœur’s own words—“race” of man and, in the short and medium term, will settle the most elementary lines in the sketch of the Self-Made Man ideal, as will be developed in depth in the first chapter, “Self-Made Nation,” of the present work.
However, the sublimity of the image of the American farmer as the man—the individual—who dominates ungodly nature with the sole strength of his determination, his perseverance and his work, would soon begin to blur. Apart from propaganda and other written idealizations, colonial intra-history showed a very different narrative, a narrative of indentured servitude, forced recruitment and importation of slaves as key elements in the consolidation, growth and prosperity of colonial America until the very dawn of the Revolution. Authors such as Heike Paul in The Myths That Made America (2013), Richard Hofstadter in America at 1750:
A Social Portrait (1973) and Kenneth A. Lockridge in A New England Town (1985) offer in-depth
analyses of colonial society in its broadest spectrum and provide an interesting vision that, although critical, is complementary to those descriptions more prone to the apologetic or that avoid the less favorable details of pre-revolutionary America.
The ideological substratum of colonial America, composed of that mixture of religiosity, promises of social justice and prosperity, was the primary element in the construction of the myth of the Self-Made Man, and Benjamin Franklin was its principal architect. His life and his legacy will be the subject matter of the second chapter, “The Self-Made Myth.” From the very beginning, the myth was a powerful tool in an America in which this new race of men described by Crèvecœur, the farmers who carved out a decent life based on hard work, were becoming a minority compared to the enormous numbers of people who came to the “New” World under indentured servitude or in slavery. The latter are hardly present in the writings of Benjamin Franklin and his considerations towards work and the path to prosperity, because Franklin came from a moderately wealthy middle-class family which he considered to be the greater part of
colonial population, and the ones with the bigger will to work. In a parallel manner to the analysis of Franklin’s canonical works such as his Autobiography (1793) or Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732), among others, the history of his life will be studied, from the arrival of his family to the colonies until his death in 1788. The profound account of his life by Walter Isaacson in Benjamin
Franklin: An American Life (2003) provides sufficient evidence of how much is true and how
much is to be questioned in the celebrated quote “from rags to riches” by Franklin, the very founding father of the myth of the Self-Made Man, a myth bigger than Franklin himself and even more lasting than his words: an ideal that encouraged men to pursue the best version of themselves through work, perseverance and honesty, to achieve a well-deserved prosperity that not only benefited them, but the entire community. The basic problem lies, on the one hand, in that the individualism of Franklinian thought could be—and has been, as will be proved in the following pages—interpreted in less positive ways and, on the other hand, in a result-oriented conception of wealth: prosperity as a self-justified value and the story of the Self-Made Man as an a posteriori consideration.
The notion of the Self-Made Man story as a retrospective consideration does not make it necessarily questionable or false. An example of this can be found in Frederick Douglass, whose story in relation to the myth will be studied in the chapter “Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Human.” Born in slavery, he fought not only for his freedom, but for being recognized as a human being, a status systematically denied to African slaves. The story of Frederick Douglass is relevant in itself because it serves as an example of hundreds of thousands of people like him, who were born and died under the yoke of slavery, a story that took place in the prelude to an armed conflict that would divide the American nation before, during and long after the first battle broke out: the Civil War. Slavery had been one of the fundamental cornerstones of American economy since the colonial era, especially in the southern states and, although the importation of slaves had been forbidden by Thomas Jefferson in 1807, the number of people subjected to this humanly unjustifiable condition kept increasing. Apart from the writings of Frederick Douglass, Roll,
Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1976) by Eugene D. Genovese and Slavery and the Numbers Game (1975) by Herbert G. Gutman, have been taken as fundamental readings for this;
or Nation Within a Nation (2011) by John Ernest, inter alia, to place Douglass’ story in the context of the situation of African American population under slavery. The story of Douglass has also been complemented by that of others who shared their experiences, such as David Walker in
Walker’s Appeal (1829). The ineluctable conclusion in the investigation of the story of Frederick
Douglass is that he is a Made Man in the broadest sense, although the discourse of the Self-Made Man does not tend to be too frequent in ethnic minorities: it is not only that he made himself within the terms established by Benjamin Franklin, but he also made his own humanity starting from a state of absolute deprivation of it. Cases like Frederick Douglass’ show that, in addition to
effort and hard work, there is a series of material circumstances that are independent to the will of the individual and that condition him in a more substantial manner. The Franklinian maxims are important indeed, but they are not the only criteria that must be considered when talking about Self-Made Men.
After Frederick Douglass and in a way that could be understood as his counterpoint, in the chapter titled “Abraham Lincoln, or, the Self-Constructed Man,” the figure of the sixteenth president of the United States will be analyzed. Lincoln stands as one of the undoubtedly most esteemed personalities in American imaginary in both political and human scene, and holds, in addition, a high position in the altars of the myth of the Self-Made Man. His legend challenges any comparison to any precedent or successor in political mythology. The story of Abraham Lincoln symbolizes a drama about greatness and quasi-religious individual achievement, about a man beleaguered by the torment and moral burden of a fratricidal war, a man who will be entrusted with reconciling something that seemed irreconcilable in an arduous task that will end claiming his very life. Central readings for this chapter orbit around the already mentioned The American
Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter, the extensive research of Lincoln’s life by Sidney
Blumenthal in A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln (2016) and William H. Herndon’s Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (1920), as well as speeches, correspondence and other documents written by Lincoln himself, and also others, compiled by different authors. Eli Cook, in The Pricing of Progress, provides valuable socioeconomic commentary on the state of affairs in the US economy during and after the abolition of slavery. All things considered after the contribution made by the selected bibliography about Lincoln’s person—and persona—there is an apparently trivial but actually noteworthy detail that, considering the almost deified image of the sixteenth president that has transcended over the centuries, continues being relevant: Abraham Lincoln was a person. A human being. The figure of the great liberator of the oppressed, the man who fought against a whole system using only his solid conviction and won is not so or, at least, not totally, inasmuch as that image is more a construct, an interested transformation of Lincoln into a consumer good, as will be seen in the following pages.
One of the goals in this analysis of the American foundational myth of the Self-Made Man, as it has been pointed out, is to study not only its maximum exponents, but also those who have in some way contributed, influenced or updated the narrative in such a way so as to allow its indelible presence through the different historical stages which this work will visit. The fifth chapter, “R. W. Emerson and the Man Made of Himself” has the aim of analyzing how, at the end of the nineteenth century, a revision of the concept of the Self-Made Man was undertaken by some of the most important thinkers of the time, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper, etcetera. At that time the ideological structure of the myth was going
through hard times, and was an object for criticism by such authors ashistorian Francis Parkman or the aforementioned Cooper, who advocated for the figure of the gentleman, of a cultural elite parallel to the economic one to serve as a model for the masses. Their vision of a sort of “cultural priesthood,” however, was weighed down by its own snobbery. Walt Whitman would stand on the opposite side: he did not criticize the concept of the Self-Made Man, only some of its maxims, such as the pursuit of wealth as the only goal of life. On the other hand, Whitman was in tune with Franklin in the aspect of believing that the good of society as a whole was the true and most noble goal. Emerson believed—broadly speaking—that each individual contained in himself the most transcendent potential, and that the key to developing it resided in self-sufficiency, in independence and in the harmony with the laws of nature. The true Self-Made Man, according to Emersonian thought, should be the living representation of these values. Although this may seem awkwardly idealistic, Emerson, as will be elaborated, had an utter sense of pragmatism—though not as much as Whitman did. Both visions do not differ to the point of opposition; rather in the right proportions to be considered complementary. Unfortunately, Emersonian thought, its philosophy about independence, self-reliance and the individual will as crucial factors ended up laying a path wide open to a whole series of superficial or flawed interpretations that distorted Emersonian individualism into a noxious distillation, known as New Thought (a founding genre of self-help), in which the search for success, power over other people, and material prosperity are the highest goals to aspire to. Such an interpretation of the myth was totally at odds with the proposals of Emerson, Whitman and other architects of the Self-Culture movement, as will be demonstrated through the analysis of William Ellery Channing’s Self-Culture (1839), Democratic
Vistas (1871) by Walt Whitman, an intensive study of the most important essays and speeches by
Emerson himself, with the support of those things said and written about by John G. Cawelti in
Apostles of the Self-Made Man (1965).
In the sixth chapter, “Mark Twain and the Parody of the Myth,” the study focuses on how the utterly necessary updating of the Franklinian myth did not exempt it, however, from an equally necessary criticism. An example of this, in addition to the critical voices mentioned above, is The
Gilded Age, A Tale of Today, a novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873.
The story takes place during the homonymous era—which took its name, precisely, from this very book—between Reconstruction (1863–1877) and the end of the nineteenth century. At this time the American economy experienced a moderate growth, a growth that served to mask a troubled social context of political corruption and poverty derived from the ravages of the Civil War. The novel is relevant to the Self-Made Man issue, mainly, because of Beriah Sellers, a character that seems to be fashioned after Dickens’s Wilkings Micawber, with those characteristic satirical traits of Twain’s and that stands as a parody of Benjamin Franklin. The central theme of the novel is the savage speculation that took hold of the American economy of the time, in which everyone
